Scottish Labour has launched a consultation on a range of NHS issues regarding recruitment, retention and support of staff in the health service.
The party has written to charities, trade unions, and associated organisations representing hundreds of thousands of patients and staff on serval issues, which includes:
- Training place numbers for health and social care workers
- Pay and career progression for health and social care staff
- Support for students training for health in social care, including bursaries and other incentives
- Reform to the system of agency staff to clamp down on costs and further changes to the bank system for health and social care staff
- Scotland’s changing demographics and need for workforce planning to reflect Scotland’s aging population
- Potential further changes to legislation and regulation to support staffing.
West Scotland MSP Neil Bibby said: “Our NHS staff do a fantastic job in increasingly difficult circumstances, but the simple truth is there just aren’t enough of them. Solving the current workforce crisis will go a long way to both addressing many of the issues in our NHS and in social care, but also in preparing the Health and Social Care sector for challenges such as the stubborn gap in health inequality, and an increasingly older population.
“Publication of this consultation document marks the next step of our Workforce Commission’s evidence gathering process, with an online survey designed for individual health and care workers to follow.
“It is a wide ranging consultation recognising the interdependency across many of our workforce sectors. We cannot simply consider nurse numbers in isolation to allied health professionals, or indeed social care workers in isolation from GPs.
“The NHS of the future is increasingly going to require support for staff from all disciplines to work more closely with each other – but to get there we must understand where and why current pressures and gaps exist.
“We recognise the complexity in the NHS workforce system and the many individual specialisms, but we also strongly recognise the need for collaboration to achieve the outcomes everyone desires.
“This year is the NHS’s 70th birthday, and only Labour is working to seriously examine the issues that have created this workforce crisis – and develop the blueprint we need to ensure our most cherished public service is fit for the next 70 years.”